Labor Day (redivivus)

 

The human year needs public holidays, each with its own import, to give structure to the cycle of experience, the way a body needs a skeleton, which else would  be a flabby blob.  The traditional Church is rich in these;  we in the secular world need cherish what few we’ve got.

For long, the Labor Day weekend served as a sort of Mardi Gras, marking the end of the lotus months of summer, a last family fling before knuckling down to to the autumnal duties of work and school.   That role has been undermined by lobbies that, in many places, have contrived to start up the school year prematurely.   (In our area, thus jumping the gun  proved especially pointless, as we've had a streak of sultry weather, and some classes had to be cancelled on that account.) Kudos to the governor of Maryland for putting a stop to that.

[re-posted from 2016]

For the roster of our posts concerning public holidays, click here.

For labor matters, here.

"Great Question"

Two flatulent practices relating to the posing of questions  have characterized political discourse in recent years, to the disbenefit of the polity.

(1)  Particularly associated with Donald Rumsfeld, though the maneuver antedates him, is posing ‘questions’ to oneself and immediately answering them.  Thus, let P and Q be propositions:  instead of saying simply

P.  Not-Q

the rhetorician draws it out into a monologue masquerading as a dialogue:

Is P true?  Sure it is!  Is Q true?   Absolutely not!

The advantages to the speaker are:

(a)  He gets to choose the ‘questions’, irrespective of whether anyone is interested in them or whether anyone would phrase the question in that manner.   As a result, they are invariably softball ‘questions’.

(b)  He gets to dwell in a bubble of his own voice.  Reporters, voters, maiden aunts, all fade into a kind of Meinongian subsistence;  and the Dialectic collapses to a trivial instantiation in the palaver of a single man.

Disadvantages to the audience include:

(c)  There is usually a substantive concern whether some proposition P be true, or what to do about it, or the like.   Yet by this slight-of-tongue, the bloviator poses instead some verbally related but substantively etiolated variant P-prime, and addresses that instead, thereby providing no real information or analysis, but leaving the impression that he has addressed P.

(d)  You have to listen to twice as much verbiage as for a straightforward “P” -- ten pounds of rhetoric in a five-pound bag.  And in time it gets freaking annoying.

(2)   In politically pre-sanitized settings like “town-halls” and related social Spectacles, an array of voters, carefully selected to represent each of the pressure groups to be pandered to, is permitted to pose a simple-minded, vaguely worded question, thus pushing a given button on the candidate’s library of prerecorded on-message speechlets.   But in a new development, the politician moves to snuggle-up to said Potemkin voter, with an enthusastic

   “Great question !!”

before launching in to her canned response.

The practice, repeated ad nauseam  (cf. SNL’s parody of Hillary Clinton’s use of this and similar maneuvers, in their satire of the Presidential ‘debates’), is distressing  even apart from its smarminess.    For the sort of low-info voter who most needs to be buttered-up and flattered, is least in position to actually pose a “great question”, or even a probing or pointed one.    Nor will, say, a scientist giving carefully-prepared, expert testimony on a complex subject  be patronized from the Congressional panel with a “Great question!”   The domains of “Great question!” and great questions, are virtually mutually exclusive.

Note:  The catchphrase “Great question!” is characteristically contemporary;  but the maneuvre is of longer date.   Speaking to a group,

Nixon would react to the most elementary question  as if he was hearing it for the first time.  He would ponder a bit, congratulate the questioner on his originality,  then give the answer he had given  hundreds of times before,  complete with some figures and a quotation,  as the citizen listened  in utter awe.
-- Stephen Ambrose, Nixon: the Triumph of a Politician 1962-1972 (1989), p. 139

~

And now, by an unhallowed congressus of these two tricks -- by Beelzebub out of Medusa -- comes the Great Rhetorical Question.  One came up this morning on NPR.

A Republican senator was touting Trump’s intention to

(i)  Increase spending (e.g. on infrastructure and defense)

and

(ii) Decrease taxes,

while

(iii) Holding down the deficit.

Now, this nation has been down that road many times before, both in speechifying and in practice;  so apart from the apparent logical incompatibility among those three desiderata, there is a track-record here, for anyone who cares to examine it.   That, however, is beyond the capacity of most pop journalists practicing today, as well as the attention-span of the average voter.    The substitute for critical inquiry, is a mere statement of undifferentiated unwillingness to be convinced -- the lazy-man’s lo-cal substitute for genuine skepticism (anatomized here).   In this case, the reporter’s Clarence-Darrow move was simply to ask, again, how (i)-(iii) might cohere.   But the politician was ready for it:

“Yes -- How can we address the problem of doing the things that need to be done, while holding the line on the deficit, without addressing the question of Entitlements? -- Great question!”

That may or may not be a Great Question, but the reporter had not posed it;  the rhetorician was congratulating himself.   And in so doing, bait-and-switched the subject from the incompatibility of (i)-(iii) to the problem of those pesky Entitlements.  A perfectly legitimate subject of debate, but here snuck-in via a side door.

~

The considerations above  recall to mind  what, for Europeans, must be the original Potemkin-“question” scam:  to wit, the Socratic dialogue.

The scenario has been solemnly sanctified,  countless times  over many years decades centuries.  The method has been dignified with the title  maieutic (etymologically relating to widwifery), whereby the savant or solon, by adroit interrogation, draws forth from the naïve listener (like a tapeworm from the bowel) innate knowledge  such that all might marvel that he hath.

As a build-up, this is terrific, only… You actually read the texts, and what you see is Socrates holding forth, more or less commendably, and harvesting the plaudits of uncomprehending minions or yes-men.

Thus, a demonstration of the Urysohn Metrization Theorem, via the Socratic method.

Socrates:  Let us, therefore, consider any topological space whatsoever, so that it have a countable basis.  You agree?

Minion: Sho’ nuff, boss!

Socrates: And may we not further stipulate, that said space be regular?  -- Surely that is not too much to ask!

Minion: True dat, Socrates!!

Socrates:  Whence it follows that, our space being regular, for any point thereof, we may define a continuous function  positive at that point, but vanishing outside of a neighborhood of that point. -- You agree?

Minion: Word up dawg, Socrates !!!!

Socrates: Whereupon we may plainly see, that by defining an infinite series of functions from said space, to …

(Socrates drones on;  the minion dozes, but his snores are taken as assent.)

Socrates: Whereupon we may plainly see, that our original space may be smoothly embedded into the countably-infinite Cartesian-product of the cube, which we earlier (you do recall this, don’t you, minion?) proved to be metrizable.  This metric is inherited by our embedded space in the subspace topology, thus proving the theorem.

Minion:  U da man, Socrates !!!

Socrates (beaming upon the evidently innate insight of his pupil):  Great answer !!!

Note:   We have it on good authority from the memoirs of Oxford dons, that any tutor who attempts to apply the Socratic “method” to draw wisdom out of the maws of wool-gathering undergraduates, comes up empty.

Laus temporis acti

Eheu!  The dumbing-down of education, the coddling of pupils these days!  Let this writer tell it:

An age in which children are taught the driest doctrines by the insinuating method of instructive games, has little reason to dread the consequences of study being rendered too serious or severe.  The history of England is now reduced to a game at cards, the problems of mathematics  to puzzles and riddles.

Forcefully written!  Only -- published just over two hundred years ago, in 1814, by Sir Walter Scott (Waverley).

Nihil sub sole  novum.

Teacher Tenure

[That title is actually a teaser;  our contribution to the debate will be of a very general sort, applicable to eristics in general, and not specifically to this.]

I recently finished reading the autobiography of R.G. Collingwood, an English philosopher (by trade) and historian (by predilection).   The principle point he argues in that book, and in his own mature philosophical publications, is that:  Before one can judge the validity of a thesis (and the key here is more worth than truth, the latter issue being less clear-cut than it traditionally makes out) one must first determine, to what question was that intended as an answer.   This perspective extends to quite practical matters:  Before engaging in a dig (for archaeology was his violon d’Ingres), you must know what it is that you are trying to find, or you will merely spoil the site.

The media this evening is (quite properly) abuzz  with this:

A California judge ruled Tuesday that teacher tenure laws deprive students of their right to an education under the state Constitution and violate their civil rights.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/us/california-teacher-tenure-laws-ruled-unconstitutional.html?hp

Different news outlets  are spinning this  in very different ways:  As a (Republican-inspired) attack on teachers unions;  as a defense (worthy of Sir Galahad) of the special interests of racial minorities;  and other flavors as well.

I shall have nothing specific to say about any of this, never having taught at a pre-college level.   It is a very, very vexed question.  -- Or rather, an inhomogeneous complexus of vexed questions;  for Collingwood’s caveat  is very valid here.  Quite apart from the complexities of analysis, of any given aspect of the case, the very case itself  presents itself, from the very outset, in the light of at least four distinct areas of broader concern -- four traditions of thought and argument:

(1) sub specie Labor Relations

(2) sub specie Education Policy

(3) sub specie Race Relations

(4) sub specie Constitutional law.

Any competent overall assessment of the merits of the case -- such as, indeed, a sitting judge is forced to render, if only by refusing to review (he does not enjoy the luxury, of professors of philosophy, who can argue the matter endlessly, in footnotes to Plato) -- would need to address all of these.  But even that “all” is something of an oversimplification, since (so to speak) those four orthogonal vectors, though they form a basis for a noëtic space, do not themselves supply a metric, whereby their separate contributions might be combined.

(For more on the matter, for those mathematically inclined, consult this.)

~

Attempting to see how this story was being reported across the outlets, I went to Google News, where the featured article was this:

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2014/0610/California-court-strikes-down-teacher-tenure-rules-in-major-ruling

But when you go to that page, instead of letting you read the article, you are hit with a pop-up, to wit:

Answer a question to continue reading this page

Have you used one of the following methods for hair removal in the last 12 months?

Salon service (waxing, laser, etc)

No, none of the above

At home waxing

Hair removal cream

At home bleach

           

[Class assignment:  Debate the relative merits of (a) bikini wax  (b) Brazil wax. 
Cite appropriate authorities where needed.]

Sometimes I think this nation is not worth saving.

~

Footnote:   This skeletal contribution, is merely meta-critical, virtually devoid of empirical (or political, or psychological) content.   For a case in which we do venture to grapple in detail with an issue of public note (with what success, you must judge yourselves), try this:

            The Depth-Psychology of Global Climate Change

We also offer a couple of very minor observations about education specifically. 

* To end-run the question of tenure -- simply do away with teachers!  (This is a trendy trend; the same thing is happening to libraries.)

     Digitizing into oblivion

* California is something of a hothouse or petri-dish for bizarrely overreaching legal intrusions into education.  We examine one here:

   An Intolerable Intrusion

[Flash update]  Making up for our own abstention from discipline-specific comment, our longtime friend and colleague, Dr. Keith Massey,  currently a teacher of Latin in high school (though with several other careers under his belt, including a stint in Canon Law), and the author of several books, offers the following viewpoint (and, I believe, very judicious one) :

Philosophically, I agree. The best teacher for all those poor kids is not always the one with tenure and seniority. So if those poor kids ever once ever had a teacher who was not the best available because the best available was let go from lack of seniority, those poor kids received unequal conditions.

The problem is, staffing schools, including the ones for those poor kids, will be *impossible* if you don't provide significant incentives for dedicated people willing to make modest salaries for the common good. Tenure and seniority provide the incentives that a teacher need not fear that slighting the wrong parent by giving a fair grade will mean termination and that staying on the job long enough to make a bit more than a modest salary will put a target on your back.

Push the current system even a bit and you will quickly find all the nation's youth taught only by fresh graduates with no experience teaching a few years for 30k and then burning out to make room for the next wave of the same.

And apparently there is a movement that wants to blow up the system to establish just that...

[Update] More canny commentary:

I am a little confused by the slippage between equal education and good education in the court’s opinion. After canvassing several major state court precedents about educational equality, the court writes:

    While these cases addressed the issue of a lack of equality of education based on the discrete facts raised therein, here this Court is directly faced with issues that compel it to apply these constitutional principles to the quality of the educational experience.

The boldface is in the original. It almost seems like argument by pun.

Later on, the court seems to backtrack and suggest that the case is about equality, not just quality, after all; it says that the “ineffective” teachers have a disparate impact on poor and non-white students. That’s a hook, at least, but as my colleague Eric Posner points out, if it’s true it seems like the more natural remedy would be to address the unequal allocation of teachers directly, not to go after tenure.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/06/11/more-doubts-about-the-california-teachers-decision/

Introducing the Fundamental Food Groups

We have elsewhere lamented that, of the (at most) half-a-dozen things they taught us in elementary school, the only one that turned out to be of any use in later life was the rhyme that mentions the date of Columbus’ discovery of the Americas (“In fourteen-hundred ninety-two...") -- and even that has now subsided into uselessness, since we are now forbidden to celebrate or even mention C*******, and are supposed to celebrate Sacagawea (or Nelson Mandela) instead.

Anyhow, among that scant half-dozen was a listing of the basic food groups.  According to the taxonomy taught by the Travell Elementary School of Ridgewood, New Jersey, ca. 1958, these are just three, classified as to whether they make you

“Go”

“Grow”

or

“Glow”.

(I kid U not.  Your Eisenhower-era tax dollars at work.)   This nicely mnemonic scheme turns out not to be endorsed by any major nutritional or endocrinological group operating outside of a kindergarten.  The only reason I even remember it is that, to the class’s immense satisfaction,  the only food said to be a member of all three said groups was …  ice cream. -- Not making this up, though our parents probably thought we were when, on the strength of this doctrine, we requested ice cream for breakfast.

Since that time, we have all been exposed to various supposed “basic food groups”, often contradicting one another, annoying because generally in the context of a harangue by food nags, and none of them as easily memorable as the one they taught us in school, whose only defect lay in the fact that it is false.

~

Well!   Just today I encountered a new and highly improved scheme of basic food groups,  offered by  Professor C.H. Taubes, in his article (which I commend to you and your children) “Differential Topology”, in Timothy Gowers, ed., The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008), p. 399.   He writes as follows:

The orientable, compact,

connected, topological,

two-dimensional manifolds

are in one-to-one correspondence

with a collection of fundamental foods:

the apple;

the doughnut;

the two-holed pretzel;

(You with me so far?)

the three-holed pretzel;

the four-holed pretzel;

and so on.

Now, I know what you’re thinking:  What’s with all the pretzels already?  But surely such topologically unique individuals  deserve to be noticed separately -- it’s nothing like the overly detailed vocabulary of this that and the other trivially different shapes of pasta, most of them homeomorphic to each other anyway.

The Fourth Fundamental Food (Euler characteristic:  -4)

~

A word on the rhetorical aspect of that slogan,  “Go/Grow/Glow”.

The taxonomy it introduced was in every respect worthless, and probably understood as such  even by the teacher.   The rhyming slogan had the advantage of being mnemonic, but, unlike the rhyme about Columbus in fourteen-hundred-ninety-two, it itself contains no information, so its retention in memory -- lo this half-century or more -- serves no purpose.  Why then trot it out in the first place, and why does it hang on in the mind?

Largely, I think, the purpose of the slogan was the slogan itself, the sheer aesthetics of its combined rhyme and alliteration;  that it pretended to categorize anything  was incidental -- indeed, instead of being used for food groups, it could equally well (or better) serve to label broad areas of Things We Do in School.   Its effect upon the pupils was not informative or even cognitive, but more like a jingle chanted while doing calisthenics.

A comparable example from German history, presenting the fundamental tripartite order of society, by social function:

            Nährstand, Wehrstand und Lehrstand

Workers, soldiers, and intelligentsia, basically;  but no-one needed the rhyme to be reminded of that.

Or the celebrated (and now denigrated) formula for the proper concerns of a decent German Hausfrau:

            Kinder, Küche, Kirche

That’s a good one;  its rhythmic regularity, its consonantal certainty, probably served to buttress, in society’s mind, the very virtues it was advocating.

[Footnote]  Compare this Classical dietetic bifurcation:

Aristotle’s speculation that the embryo receives two kinds of food from its mother: one to generate form, the other to increase size.

-- Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), p. 236

.

The Frog in the Crock-Pot

I truly wish I were making this up:

«Est-il nécessaire d'apprendre à nos enfants à aimer les travestis?», peut-on lire en boucle sur les réseaux sociaux. L'information bruisse sur les blogs des sympathisants de la Manif pour tous depuis quelques jours. Le livre Papa porte une robe ferait son entrée dans les salles de classe de l'école primaire.

En 2010, la présentation du Baiser de la Lune, un dessin animé sur l'homosexualité destiné aux élèves de CM1 et de CM2, avait provoqué des réactions outrées d'associations catholiques.-

http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2013/05/28/01016-20130528ARTFIG00664-la-theorie-du-genre-s-immisce-a-l-ecole.php?m_i=v8wv0jHcrIW_Y_IWXtaeDQHvRKgFDX%2Ba%2BVxD_XOMrjW887W1Z

(The frog in the crock-pot muses:  Hmmmm….. seeeemmms a bit warmmmm ….. Mmmmmmm….. )

Some readers comment (but really, by this point, the needed response  goes beyond words):

Le lavage de cerveau a commencé, ce sera le règne des décérébrés....

---

Il faut faire pression autant que nous pouvons sur tous les acteurs de cette entreprise satanique !

---

Le pire, c'est ils ne sauront ni lire, ni ecrire, ni compter.

---

Le mariage pour tous est la première étape de destruction de notre société, destruction visant à créer des individus sans racines, sans repères, interchangeables, uniquement des producteurs-consommateurs soumis à leurs désirs.

----

Tiens mon papa et ma maman, ont tous les deux des quéquettes ! (ou, ils n'en ont pas ) POURQUOI ? Ils sont de quels genre ? ......! Comment ils ont fait pour nous faire ? La bêtise de cette loi Taubira est colossale et contre nature. Les animaux sont eux normaux !

---

Selon l'eschatologie musulmane,
la periode que nous vivons correspond a la proche fin du monde. J'ai bien peur que sur ce point la, ils aient raison !

---

Un individualisme vide qui confine à l'autisme à ce stade de narcissisme.

---

LGBT et consorts ne perdent pas de temps, ayant soumis Hollande. A peine votée la loi Taubira, vénéneuse de toute évidence, ils passent précipitamment à l'étape suivante. Il va falloir que l'opposition se radicalise, pas moyen de rester doux et tranquille devant une telle déferlante de catastrophes

---

Depuis l'arrivée de la gauche au pouvoir on a l'impressions que la priorité des priorités, l'urgence absolue en France, c'est l'homosexualité. N'y a-t-il pas de problème plus urgent? Alors que les enseignants ne parviennent pas à apprendre aux jeunes à lire, à écrire et à compter correctement, doivent-ils passer du temps à éveiller à l'homosexualité? N'est-ce pas se substituer à la famille?

---

Les norvégiens sont revenus en arrière sur cet enseignement stupide, qui a en fait créer l'inverse de ce qu'ils pensaient. Et nous on s’engouffre dedans!

*

Si cela vous parle,

savourez la série noire

en argot authentique d’Amérique :

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justiceexcerptdivorce.html

*

The Three Bears

A PC-approved fable  for use in modern kindgergartens

“As the Twig is Bent,

So grows the Tree.”

Once upon a time there were three bears (plus a cat, their Domestic Companion):

Parent-Bear #1,

Parent-Bear #2,

and an underage bear.

They lived in Section 8 housing in the woods.

[Update 4 June 2013]  And now this:  the egregious, the ineffable French Justice Minister  Mme Taubira  imposes a re-education camp for judicial thoughtcrime:

Taubira impose un stage  sur l'identité de genre aux magistrats

http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2013/06/02/01016-20130602ARTFIG00153-taubira-impose-un-stage-sur-l-identite-de-genre-aux-magistrats.php?m_i=bOcbKh514sEUvHBWMCeXSUO%2BzpReMg8NhcuaM8iR2jX6vA2HL

[Update 17 November 2014]  France is abuzz over the participation of a French citizen in the latest ISIL beheading-festival.   But a more thoughtful reader comments:

Vous avez peur de l'EI ? Pas moi, moi j'ai peur de ceux qui autorisent le voile dans la rue, en accompagnement des élèves. L'EI veut allez trop vite, il tue, donc on le combat et il ne fait pas les poids. Les autres eux sont en train de gagner, lentement mais plus surement. Comparez la France d'il y a 30 ans.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2014/11/16/01016-20141116ARTFIG00193-etat-islamique-la-piste-d-un-francais-parmi-les-bourreaux.php?pagination=3#nbcomments

.

Souvenirs d’apprentissage (bis)

I am currently reading the memoirs of André Weil, doyen of algebraic geometry, Souvenirs d’apprentissage.  Herewith a couple of notes.

The first thing you notice is that he is a very graceful writer when he so chooses.  You do not see this in his mathematical writings, which are straightforward and businesslike, when not (very occasionally) interrupted  by some dyspeptic outburst (we quoted one of them here).   And as he stresses the importance of hewing to original languages whenever possible (he himself was an admirable polyglot), we shall so hew here.

~

Weil prefaces his book with a tribute to his late wife:

Notre mariage a été de ceux qui font mentir La Rochefoucauld.  Fulsere vere candidi mihi soles…

For an elucidation of that Latin tag, I naturally turned to that fons sapientiae, Dr. Massey, who replied by return of post:

"Bright suns truly shone for me"

It's from Catullus Carmina 8, in which the poet is depressed after being dumped by his lover Lesbia.

~

Since Weil was born in 1906 (and ripened early), and the memoirs were not published until 1991, we sometimes get the benefit of the long view.   Alluding to the current Lake-Wobegone system of American puericulture, he remarks:

N’est-il pas étrange que l’émulation se trouve honnie à présent  comme ressort pédagogique, alors que l’esprit de compétition, dans presque tout les domaines, n’a peut-être jamais été si âpre qu’il l’est aujourd’hui ?

He also speaks somewhat dismissively of “the New Math” fad in schools, counterposing the value of a traditional grammatical education for training the mind:

Est-ce pure coïncidence  que l’Inde, avec Pânini, ait inventé la grammaire  avant d’inventer la numération décimale  et les nombres négatifs,  et que  par la suite  grammaire et algèbre aient pris  toutes deux  dans la civilisation médiévale de langue arabe  l’essor que l’on sait ?  Naguère on a cru préparer les petits enfants à l’étude des mathématiques  en les forçant à parler d’ensembles, de bijections, de nombres cardinaux  et de l’ensemble vide.  Peut-être n’y étais-je pas moins bien préparé par l’étude de l’analyse grammatical …

Later in the volume (p. 120) we read of another glancing yet important brush between linguistics and pure mathematics :  the ushering of structure, rather than number, to center stage:

Quant au choix du mot de structure, mes souvenirs sont en défaut;  mais à cette époque  il était déjà entré … dans le vocabulaire des linguistes, et je conservais des contacts avec ce milieu, et tout particulièrement avec Emile Benveniste …

*

Si cela vous parle,

savourez la série noire

en argot authentique d’Amérique :

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justiceexcerptdivorce.html

*

~

André Weil was the brother of the better-known Simone Weil.  In the preface, he excuses himself for alluding to her but little, pleading that he has already said what he has to say, to her biographer.  But, recounting a stroll with some monks at Santo Domingo de Silos, he writes:

De leur conversation, au cours de la promenade rituelle dans le cloître, il m’est resté une phrase.  Comme il était question d’un saint au comportement quelque peu excentrique, l’un d’eux fit observer doucement, «Mais le christianisme est une folie» («el cristianismo es una locura»); ce propos, parfaitement orthodoxe, m’est souvent revenu à l’esprit au sujet de la vie de ma sœur.

~

Weil’s 1938 cri de cœur, “Science française”, which begins "J'en ai assez!", and which was refused publication at the time, is reprinted in the Œuvres scientifiques,  as was its eventual post-war airing.  But since neither version names names, nor does Wikipedia mention the incidents in question s.v. Jean Perrin,  here is a tidbit (p. 126):

L’une des cliques en question, et sans doute la plus puissante, avait  à sa tête  le physicien Jean Perrin, prix Nobel, … inventeur du C.N.R.S.  Non content des moyens importants dont il disposait déjà, il imagina de créer toute une hiérarchie de médailles  assorties de récompenses pécuniaires,  depuis la grande médaille d’or  jusqu’aux médaillettes … Il n’était pas difficile de soupçonner que la devise en serait:
«Nul n’aura de l’esprit   que nous  et nos amis.»

*

Pour d’autres friandises

de la confiserie 

du docteur Justice,

consultez:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

I am reminded of a comment one writer made  on the much-ballyhoo’d creation of some new honor or other (it may have been the MacArthur):  “another lap in the meritocratic rat-race”.

~

All told, the book is mathematically disappointing.  I don’t mean that it should have been stuffed with equations.   But we do hope for some insight into mathematical ideation, such as is furnished by the memoirs of Hardy or of Hadamard.   For one thing, the field he helped to found, algebraic geometry, has the reputation of being one of the most ferociously abstract of all human endeavors.   It must be very different working in that field, or in topos theory, from solving the four-color problem or classifying finite simple groups.  But of this we get not an inkling. 

Above all,  Weil was long a core member of one of the most sociologically remarkable mathematical activities of all time:  the Bourbaki group, which labored collectively and published anonymously.   What was that like ?  

Apart from the pranks and in-jokes  characteristic of any working group, we are not given a glimpse.

So, frustrated at the reticence of one of its founding members,  I have no recourse but to quote the following satirical evaluation:

Named after a French general of widely admired stupidity, the Bourbaki was founded in the 1930’s  .. A committee was formed  and pedagogical improvements discussed.

This is the myth.  In all of French history, no mathematician of standing has ever concerned himself with the welfare of his students.  The Bourbaki was founded to amused the members of the Bourbaki.

To a man, these mathematicians believed that their first order of business was to correct, and, if possible, eliminate, the work of other mathematicians.

-- David Berlinski, Infinite Ascent (2005)

~

En fin de compte … Our attempt to experience mathematics more richly  by reading the memoirs of its practitioners, is like that of the gum-snapping beautician devouring the latest tabloids for the off-screen escapades of her favorite stars.  In both cases, we court a simulacrum of what is ultimately inaccessible.  Indeed, the beautician is  if anything  launched upon a more reasonable quest.   If you think that Lindsay Lohan is an interesting person, then her antics in the National Equirer should be satisfying, since that shallow cipher is little more than the sum of her antics.   Whereas the well-written, travelogue-y accounts of André Weil  gave no sense of what it is like to have his sort of towering mathematical mind -- they might have been written by anyone.  (Quine’s memoir, The Time of my Life, was disappointing in the same way.)

~

For another not-so-close encounter with algebraic geometry, via the man and not the math, click here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/12/adventures-in-algebraic-geometry.html

~

André Weil’s teacher Jaques Hadamard, a major figure of number theory and cryptography, is best known to the lay public for his booklet Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field;  my father, no mathematician, but a typical subscriber to Eisenhower-era Scientific American, had it on his shelves, where I made its acquaintance in high school.  Spurred yet disappointed by Weil’s memoir, I ordered what I presumed to be the French original of this book, via InterLibrary Loan;  and in due course  it arrived at our local library.

Mais encore -- quelle déception !  For much the same reasons as Weil, Hadamard had fled (in 1940) to the United States, and indeed specifically to Princeton.  And it was there that he wrote that memoir, in English, which Princeton University Press brought out in 1945.

France just doesn’t know how to hold onto its mathematicians -- as Weil was already complaining in 1938.   And it was at Princeton that I made the acquaintance of the likewise-exiled French mathematician who earned a Fields medal for proving the Weil Conjectures, Pierre Deligne (we were fellow parents at the Princeton Friends School, and met to plan-out Math Day).   A distinguished intellectual genealogy, all very baronial -- but abroad.

~

For more from this pen, including a soon-to-be-released new title:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

~ Afterword ~

I have from time to time -- fitfully, fretfully -- pecked away at some of the works of that French collectivity Bourbaki, without profit or enjoyment.   There is, then, a certain wry comfort in this assessment by their celebrated countryman René Thom:

No new theorem of any importance came out of the immese effort at systematization of Nicolas Bourbaki -- which in itself is not a true formalization, because Bourbaki uses a nonformalized metalanguage.

-- René Thom, “’Modern’ Mathematics (1971), repr. in Thomas Tymoczko, ed., New Directions in the Philosophy of Mathematics (1986, rev. 1998), p. 73

[Update]  The slim pickings of mathematical morsels in Weil’s memoir  are slightly supplemented by an anecdote in a book I just finished reading, the highly entertaining Genius in my Basement (2011), by Alex Masters.   (The genius alluded to  is not Weil  but group-theorist Simon Norton;  more elsewhere anon.)  The anthropologist Lévi-Srauss, he relates, baffled at what structure underlay Australian marriage taboos 

… went around New York … banging on the doors of mathematicians.  The first was dismissive:  “Mathematics has four operations, and marriage is not one of them.”  But the second was the young and brilliant André Weil… “When in doubt,” cried Mr. Weil, “look for the group!” and he bustled Lévi-Strauss off the street  into his study.  Within a few days, Weil had solved the problem.

(“Group” in the sense of Group Theory, of course;  though indeed sibs and clans can be relevant.)

Non-word of the day: “race”

The French Constitution stipulates:

La France est une République indivisible, laïque, démocratique et sociale. Elle assure l'égalité devant la loi de tous les citoyens sans distinction d'origine, de race ou de religion.

But now the French President, François Hollande, wants to suppress the phrase that guarantees equal treatment to every “race”. -- What, does he wish to introduce racially invidious policies?   No no no, au contraire.   Rather, he wishes to suppress the word “race”, to deny the very existence of the fact itself.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/2013/01/31/01002-20130131ARTFIG00417-vers-la-suppression-du-mot-race-dans-la-constitution.php?m_i=3E03v09pX0NxWF8puNITXWHrZNo2R_TfT5A4DJM6w4bK7smxA

~

Absurd, you smile.   But similar doings are afoot, this side the Atlantic.

The other day, NPR broadcast a longish segment about the Civil War era, in which they refused to use the word slaves, using instead the circumlocution enslaved people.  I think I shall write them an indignant letter, saying that the phrase is very offensive, and that we should only ever say “Americans With Enslavement” (AWEs).

[Update 27 September 2013]  That euphemism comes from the political-correctness side of the aisle.  For a euphemism from the opposite camp, we turn to Mauretania, where slavery is still very much alive, though its existence is denied by the government:

Da die genaue Zahl der versklavten Menschen im Land unbekannt sei, könne die Regierung behaupten, Sklaverei existiere nicht. Die Behörden sprächen vielmehr vom Phänomen der «Gens de Maison».

http://www.nzz.ch/aktuell/international/auslandnachrichten/die-sklaverei-ist-nicht-verschwunden-1.18157241?extcid=Newsletter_27092013_Top-News_am_Morgen

*

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

[Update 17 Oct 13]  India also a major offender:

http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-global-slavery-20131018,0,808184.story

*

For a related case, cf. this:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/10/word-of-day-n-updated.html

[Note: You must be at least 86 years old to access this post.  Honor system, now...]

[Update 8 Oct 2013]  The leading Swiss newspaper, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, offers a quite informative politico-linguistic picture, of the knots that German speakers are tying themselves into, to refer to “gypsies” without giving offense:

http://www.nzz.ch/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/roma-sinti-zigeuner-1.18163686?extcid=Newsletter_08102013_Top-News_am_Morgen

For another word forbidden in parts of Europe -- too sensitive for me to dare write down -- click here.

[Update 17 November 2014]   The Spanish cognate for ‘race’ is raza.  Hispanic activists have long referred to themselves, pridefully, as La Raza.  For this,  they get a pass;  no-one whispers so much as a murmur.    Can you imagine if German-Americans were to refer to themselves as Die Rasse ??   (Once again, the goose-sauce must not splatter the gander.)

And, fait-divers:

India tops global slavery index with 14.3 mn people enslaved

http://www.financialexpress.com/article/economy/india-tops-global-slavery-index-with-14-3-mn-people-enslaved/

[Update 1 Feb 2015]  P.C.  editors execute some delicate steps, in dancing around the subject.  Thus, a headline in this morning’s New York Times -- specifically from its Review section, a hotbed of politically-correct headlines (which sometimes ill-match the content of the actual article):

Closing the Math Gap for Boys

Immediately, this accomplishes three things:

(1) Reinforcing the doctrine that our first educational priority is not to raise an educated generation, ready to meet advancing challenges, but to scumble any too-conspicuous distinctions in achievement and ability among groups.

(2) Implying that girls are better in math than boys.

(3) Highlighting extra services aimed specially at males (who do not generally, as a group, benefit from affirmative action), and directing our attention to that lamentable gender, and away from race for a change.

The editors hope that you will stop reading right there, taking away with you only points (1) - (3); the intrepid might read as far as the subhead, “A tutoring program in Chicago lifts test scores”  (Worthwhile Canadian Initiative).

Only … If you actually read the article, the premise evaporates.  The cohort being tutored here, are not boys, as such, but “African-American and Latino boys”.   As for whether (cohort for comparable cohort) there exists any “math gap” between the genders, we are offered to evidence one way or the other;  we learn merely, that apples pass more naturally into pies than do oranges (“The average reading and math scores of eighth-grade black boys  are barely higher than those of fourth-grade white girls”).

.